Why does the Israeli/Palestinian conflict garner so much attention and generate so much passion, as compared to other similar sorts of conflicts (e.g. Chechnya or Kashmir). Today at Real Clear Politics, Dennis Prager offers some possible reasons (his choice of comparisons is the situation in Tibet). Of the seven reasons he gives, two seem especially plausible:

China. If Tibet had been crushed by a white European nation, the Tibetans would have elicited far more sympathy. But, alas, their near-genocidal oppressor is not white. And the world does not take mass murder committed by non-whites nearly as seriously as it takes anything done by Westerners against non-Westerners. Furthermore, China is far more powerful and frightening than Israel. Israel has a great army and nuclear weapons, but it is pro-West, it is a free and democratic society, and it has seven million people in a piece of land as small as Belize. China has nuclear weapons, has a trillion U.S. dollars, an increasingly mighty army and navy, is neither free nor democratic, is anti-Western, and has 1.2 billion people in a country that dominates the Asian continent.

[T]elevision news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern.

In addition to the candidates mentioned by Prager, I would add the following: Continue reading →

I wasn’t there, but from everything I’ve heard, the years after the Second Vatican Council were, for many in the West, a time of confusion and chaos. Changes from the Council (such as the abandonment of the Latin mass and the prohibition on eating meat on Friday) were seen as marking a decisive break with the past. Everything was up for grabs. Priests abandoned their cassocks and occasionally their orders, mass became a time for spiritual experimentation (much of it silly, given the nature of the age), and a small group of activists and academics began to cite the “spirit of Vatican II” as justification for making even more radical changes to Church doctrine and belief.

Catholics, a.k.a.The Conflict, posits a world in which these radicals won. The film is set in what was then the near future but is now would be the recent past. Rome is now part of an ecumenical organization a la the World Council of Churches. Distinctive Catholic practices like private confession and Lourdes have been suppressed, and the Church hierarchy seems more interested in Buddhist dialogue and fomenting revolution in the Third World than with the salvation of souls.

There have been a lot of calls recently for a fence along the Mexican border to discourage illegal immigration. But at least one Arizona community wants to go further:

Faced with high-levels of crime and illegal immigration, authorities in Yuma are reaching back to a technique as old as a medieval castle to dig out a “security channel” on a crime-ridden stretch of the border and fill it with water.”The moats that I’ve seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here,” said Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden, who is backing the project.”It’s innovative thinking. It doesn’t take much brainpower to build a 12-foot high fence around something, but this is unique.”

The theme of bringing people back from the dead has been a theme of science fiction and horror at least since the time of Mary Shelley, generally with the underlying moral lesson being that it’s bad bad bad. But as Eve Tushnet notes, the moral argument underlying such a message is often lacking:

most “came back wrong” stories rely on an over-easy assertion that it’s wrong to cheat death without any sense of why that might be true. My most blatant example of this is the Buffy episode right after “The Body”–I can’t remember the title, but if you’ve seen it you know the one I mean–where there’s an explicit conversation about why bringing back the dead might be wrong, but you never get anything beyond, “Uh, it might not work.”Pet Sematary, I think, actually shows the protagonist’s confusion of love with self-comfort and self-projection from fairly early on in the story–what he wants back is only partly the dead beloved. Mostly he wants to stop hurting–which is incredibly sympathetic… but not quite the same thing. And so it makes sense to me that he gets back nothing but a familiar skin filled with projected horror.

Part of me wants to say that the reason it’s hard to give a justification for the claim that it’s wrong to bring back the dead is because the claim is false. Continue reading →

With liberalized credit rules, many people with limited income could access a mortgage and choose, for the first time, if they wanted to own a home. And most of those who chose to do so are hanging on to their mortgages. According to the national delinquency survey released yesterday, the vast majority of subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages are in good condition,their holders neither delinquent nor in default.

There’s no question, however, that delinquency and default rates are far too high. But some of this is due to bad investment decisions by real-estate speculators. These losses are not unlike the risks taken every day in the stock market.

The argument that abortion is largely a function of poverty is simple and initially plausible. Children cost money. The less money one has, the less likely one will be able to afford having a child. Therefore, the poorer a woman is, the more likely it is she will have an abortion if she becomes pregnant.

This argument may sound plausible, but is it actually true? DarwinCatholic has a post up today which runs the numbers and concludes that there is less connection between the poverty rate and the abortion rate than one might think. I can’t say whether Darwin is right or not, but there are a couple of reasons to doubt whether the argument given above tells the whole story about abortion and poverty.

One of the central principles of Catholic Social Thought is the preferential option for the poor, that is, the idea that special attention ought to be paid to the condition of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. For many, the preferential option for the poor justifies the creation and expansion by the government of so-called welfare programs, in which the government spends tax dollars in order to alleviate poverty. Others object to at least some of these programs, arguing that they are ineffective, create perverse incentives, or crowd out alternative solutions provided by private groups and voluntary associations. I don’t propose to try and settle these disputes here. But it is worth noting just how much (or how little) of spending on these welfare programs actually goes to the poorest members of society.

A while back I promised that I would write a post on markets and the universal destination of goods. That post will probably have to wait a while, I’m afraid. But as a down payment, I offer this intriguing twopart essay by John Nye, an economics professor at Washington University. Prof. Nye starts by asking us to

[i]magine a system where the efforts of the richest people in the world greatly expand the range and quality of goods and services available to most people—oftentimes at the expense of those groups at or near the top of the income ladder. Imagine a system where wealthy capitalists and ambitious innovators work day and night on projects with little chance of success, all at their own expense. Sometimes, even to the point where even the most successful among them manage to capture only a small part of the benefits while the rest goes to the average man or woman in the street. In their own lives they have the privilege of paying more for goods that they always would have bought, while the poorest get better, more numerous, and more widely available goods at cheaper prices than ever before.

He then goes on to argue that “in the real world, no system would come closer to implementing the most important parts of this scheme than market capitalism.” It’s definitely worth a read.

About Me

Blackadder is a man of mystery, but in his spare time he blogs. He would sometimes describe himself as conservative, sometimes as libertarian, though both terms have a lot of baggage associated with them (for the record: no, he doesn’t want to nuke Mecca, and yes, he does have a job). It also doesn’t help that he changes his mind a lot.